At the end of April, I had a serious bike accident. Upon hearing about it, everyone asked the same question: Were you wearing a helmet?

I was, but the helmet had absolutely no role in protecting me from injury.

However, one simple thing could have saved me from the hospital: fixing a depression in the road that was unnoticeable to a car but caused me to lose control of the bike.

Staying last week in the colonial city of Antigua, Guatemala, I got a chance to reflect anew on how we ask the wrong questions about bicycle safety interventions—whether helmets, special bike lanes or dedicated trails.

For days I walked the narrow streets in a place whose street grid was set in the 1700s and has scarcely changed since. (Photo: Zack Clark)

Sidewalks average about a meter wide and narrow further wherever barred windows project into the walkway. Each block is built right to the corner. The only traffic controls are alto signs painted on the sides of buildings.

There are no lanes painted on the streets, which are cobblestone canted toward the center for drainage. On the outskirts, there are speed bumps, but the irregular pavement in the central city functions as one continuous deterrent to speeding.

The streets fill with pedestrians, cars, motorcycles, trucks and tuc-tucs, while the town's distinctive buses prowl the main drags.

Nevertheless, bikes were part of the traffic and after three days of walking, I was ready to jump on one of the bikes at the place we were staying. A Murray Baja with no working rear brake, it looked about average for the beat-up mountain bikes I saw on the street—underinflated tires, discount store frames and missing or maladjusted parts.

Perfect, in fact, for the rough streets, slow pace and lack of poles for securing the bikes. This rack at a cathedral was the only one I saw.

However, I did enjoy several rides through the city, sans helmet, and never felt endangered in this foreign environment.

Here's why:

Speed. The narrow, bumpy streets, short sightlines and mixed traffic meant everyone was going at approximately bicycle speed—6 to 10 miles an hour. The mass of larger vehicles is a lot less dangerous at these low speeds.

Driver attention. Although I saw lots of Guatemalans looking at cell phones on the street, the drivers didn't. There was simply too much going on, with tuc-tucs and motorbikes and proximity to pedestrians, for a driver to be inattentive or to have the illusion that he was in control. Likewise, there was no advantage to racing to beat a light or to pass another vehicle.

Cyclist attention. A lot of cyclist bad behavior is related to maintaining momentum or taking advantage of gaps in traffic. The same factors that slowed down the drivers and made them pay attention affected the cyclists, too. I saw only two riders in full kits with road bikes and helmets during my stay. One was walking and the other was rolling along at about 4 mph. Neither of them looked as happy as this guy, who was the only other rider I saw wearing a helmet, with good reason.

My Guatemalan experience reinforces that we are asking the wrong questions and arguing over the wrong solutions if all we talk about are adjustments like helmet use and advisory bike lanes.

It’s safe to say that there isn’t any conclusive evidence that helmets
help. The scientific community has been split down the middle for two
decades. There are basically two camps: those who look at head injuries
and look for ways to prevent them, and those who work towards getting
more people to choose the bicycle as transport.

Another, unnamed camp has the biggest voice in the matter, though.

Our cities are built and engineered for cars, so car traffic rules. Whatever changes are made to help equalize that difference will be more effective than putting every cyclist in a helmet.

The Minnesota GOP announced its new, streamlined committee structures yesterday, complete with some visual aids that showed how the previous House and Senate committee structures had been a maze of tangled relationships.

Not surprisingly, the chart showing the committee structure under DFL leadership looked like this.

In comparison, the GOP structure is a model of clarity:

I took a quick crack at my own rendition, using the design approach applied to the DFL and using the committee lists reported here. Without even trying hard to make the GOP look bad, I came up with this:

Is the GOP revision of committees (which was discussed by both parties last session) an improvement? Possibly so. But was the old arrangement as bad as they made it look?

Gumby's creator, Art Clokey, passed away this week. The story of his abandonment as a child and subsequent adoption has a wonderful outcome.

There's a local angle to the Gumby story, connected to another interesting character behind its success.

It appears that Gumby was one of the pioneers in marketing kids' toys
through TV shows, though in this case, the show came before the toy.

TV stations broadcasting the Gumby films that introduced the claytoon character to the nation typically didn't pay for the program. For Clokey to make any money, he had to use the free air time as promotion for a product he could sell — a Gumby toy.

But Clokey was a film maker, not a toymaker, so eventually he licensed Gumby to a Minneapolis-based company, Lakeside Industries, and worked with an inventor named Jim Becker. (The story of the arrangement can be read in this Court of Appeals case dealing with a tax issue.)

In addition to manufacturing and selling Gumby, Lakeside marketed all kinds of cheesy toys and games. Some, like Barrel of Monkeys,Tub Town and the Big Wheel predecessor The Cheetah, still have their fans. Others, like American Heroes and the examples collected here, are largely lost, moldering in cabins or languishing on ebay.

I ran into Lakeside years ago when the company called looking for someone to write instructions for a new family card game called Sequence, a variation on Concentration that has rightly passed into oblivion.

After showing up at the company headquarters in a nondescript New Hope light industrial building, I was ushered into the office of owner Zom Levine.

Zom was a minute 80-something who dressed impeccably in tailored suits and custom, collarless shirts with studs instead of buttons. I suppose in New York City there are still buildings full of these old gentlemen, who make very good money from running obscure businesses — ladies shoulder pad manufacturers, button stampers and safety pin distributors — but here in Minnesota, Zom was pretty exotic.

I have been in many offices of men who ran giant enterprises, but Zom's was the most impressive — and most secure. It was locked, with him inside, and I had to be buzzed in.

Unlike the concrete block and fluorescent ambiance of the rest of the building, his large office was dark paneled and mood-lit with a six-foot-long NASCAR racer Budweiser beer light hung over a pool table.

It turned out Zom was not just in the toy business (and the flex-film electronic control pad business). He was also a promotional beer sign mogul.

You have seen his company's work, dating back to the Hamm's Beer signs, lamps and prized Scenorama motorized displays, neon baseball signs for Miller or palm trees for Corona, and this Clydesdale under glass.

The beer sign business, I learned, had a handful of regional companies like Lakeside that came up with new sign ideas for the dominant buyers, Miller and Budweiser. The brewers would accept certain designs, then take the drawings and bid out the manufacturing. The originators hoped their familiarity with the design would give them an advantage pricing the job, but if they didn't match the low bid, they got nothing for their effort.

The brewers exploited this system for years. The neon sign shops grumbled but played the game because beer was the main industry still using neon for new promotions.

I worked with Zom as he tried to come up with new ways to break the hammerlock Lakeside and the other small companies were in. But the companies were nervous about losing all their business if the big boys decided they weren't being sufficiently subservient.

A couple years later, for his efforts organizing the suppliers against the abusive bidding system, Zom was indicted and convicted of price-fixing.

I find it hard to believe these neon benders had any power to hurt the giant companies, but maybe it just shows Zom's competitors were right. They could not control their own destinies in the beer sign business. If they fought the system, they'd be ruined one way or the other.

Art Clokey found a way around the TV system to make his films and make a nice living. But he couldn't have done it without Zom Levine.

Thomas Fisher, dean of the College of Design at the University of Minnesota, takes a systems design angle on the same subject. He writes about fracture-critical systems for a forthcoming book of essays commemorating the collapse of the I-35W bridge over the Mississippi.

He starts by describing the conditions that led to the bridge falling and then applies the same design principles to other systems showing signs of failure: global finance, the electric grid, oil-dependent transportation and the suburban monoculture.

For most of American
history, we built communities over time, deploying diverse building
types and accommodating different kinds of households. Such communities
are resilient precisely because they are socially and economically
diverse. Yet lately we’ve constructed a different America: subdivisions
consisting entirely of single-family houses alike in design, size,
price, et al., usually built all at once by a single contractor.
Developers like uniformity because it’s easier to finance, build,
market and sell, with the promise to prospective homeowners that the
neighbors will be much like them and they needn’t worry about the
frictions that crop up in more compact, mixed-use, mixed-income
communities.

[...]

Is it an exaggeration to say our species itself is now
fracture-critical? But of course we have the capacity to envision and
create a better future. For a long time humans lived in resilient and
sustainable ways, husbanding finite resources for future generations,
cultivating renewable resources to maintain quantity and diversity, and
encouraging pleasure in unquantifiable resources like community,
creativity and empathy.

But the first challenge is to mind the
warnings. The systems we’ve created to support civilization seem
strong, even invincible. We never really expect the bridge to fall into
the river.

Here are a couple views of the new curbside bike lane on First Avenue North.

Downtown drivers were starting to get used to the new regime where they parked to the left of the bike lane.

But with the snow the markings on the pavement and the distances to the curb are obscured. That means double trouble for the bike lanes.

First, the bike lane becomes the snow collection zone, both for plowed snow from the street and for snow cleared from the sidewalk by the businesses. I saw a city plow on the street when I was shooting this, but with the cars parked where they are, there's no way to get the blade close to the curb.

The longer the snow remains unplowed, the more it will be compacted by parked cars, people getting out of cars to plug their meters, etc. Unless we have a total melt or a warm streak that allows the plows to clear down to the pavement, the bike lanes will be an obstacle course of bumps, ice, wheelwell chunks and misaligned vehicles for the rest of the winter.

I'm not blaming the drivers here. It's more a problem with putting a San Diego design in a Minneapolis climate.

An early-shopping mother had bought a Sunday red Tiger Woods branded shirt as a Christmas present for her adult son. She was talking with a group of women about whether she should take it back to the store and exchange it for another brand.

One suggestion: It's his gift, let him take it back if he wants.

Mother: Well... I'd feel good if he did that, but what if he doesn't? Then I'd be annoyed whenever I saw him wear it.

Another said: It's your shirt until you give it to him. If it makes you feel icky, return it. He'll never know.

Mother: I'll take it back this afternoon.

That's the abridged version. No one really questioned why the mom would feel that way or that her desire to dump the shirt was at all off base.

Let me speculate here that a men's discussion might go differently, with the least noxious statement being to the effect that it's just a shirt.

I, for one, have changed my buying pattern and no longer will purchase
Nike, Gatorade or any Pepsi products, Gillette is a goner, AT&T
will never be my cell phone carrier and I no longer use my AmEx credit
card. [...]

And Jason responds:

give me a break, you expect us to believe that you will not purchase
nike, pepsi, gillette, at&t, or amex products – this is a crock,
and any educated consumer will base their purchase decisions on product
quality and perceived value, not sponsorship

Kurt also rationalizes:

First of all, the sponsor companies did not know about Tiger’s
actions until after the fact. This is why you are seeing and will
continue to see certain sponsors drop Tiger. So you can’t really blame
the consumer companies. They did what they thought to be best at the
time of acquiring him as a spokesperson.

The sponsored athlete does not make the products good, the producing company does. The athlete is merely a marketing strategy.

Like Jason said, if you are dumb enough to buy or drop products
solely because of the associated athlete, then you are NOT a smart,
educated consumer.

These guys totally miss the fact that they are paying extra for the "perceived value" of a $75 to $100 TW shirt. They are ignoring their own response to the emotional dimension of brands, as well as the fact that women consumers may view Tiger's behavior differently than they do.

Bill has a more nuanced take:

I
see Nike & Woods as actually four brands: 1) the Tiger Woods
garments with his TW logo. These sales will suffer. 2) Nike golf clubs
which had a poor image until Tiger won with them. These too may suffer,
somewhat. 3) Nike golf clothing. Not a factor. You’re not going to
switch to inferior fabrics/styles at Adidas etc. to avoid the swoosh.
4) Other Nike sporting goods. Not a factor. But back to #1 and 2…Nike
has to think twice about its ads showing Tiger in a “heroic”
follow-thru pose.

Given that a lot of menswear is purchased by women, Nike has to
be concerned about the likelihood that its Tiger line of
clothing is going to take a hit. For how long remains to be seen, but the value of his endorsement has to have plummeted.

And if sales do drop, it's certainly not a matter of women not being "smart, educated consumers."

Will China have its own real estate bubble? And what would that mean for the world economy?

Here's a very interesting news report from Al Jazeera (via TC Streets for People) that chronicles the building boom in China, which includes a $585 billion government stimulus package critics say is designed to inflate the country's GDP growth.

Ordos, Mongolia, an empty new city in "China's Texas," is the focus of the story. The government has built the city from scratch — 30 km away from the current Ordos — but so far, the city is largely vacant except for construction workers.

Gleaming new houses and apartments have absentee owners, and what economy there exists is based building and real estate speculation by China's new rich. As one commenter puts it, no one in China has ever lost money in real estate, and so that's where much of the nation's cash is going.

While Ordos is neither Brasillia nor Dubai, it has some features of both, with central planning and capitalist ostentation in harness, pulling it into the future.

The Ordos 100 Villas project is an example. Architects from around the world have been invited to design villas for the new city. As in this example, the designs are showy and magnificently isolated from any context or real Chinese city life.

During my trip to China several years ago, I saw new cities designed to replace those drowned by the Seven Gorges dam, as well as new city centers built next to the old and polluted cities. The contrasts were striking, as if the places had simply skipped centuries.

But the streets were not empty, and the sky was not the pristine blue of the architects' and speculators' dreams.

The study [...] concluded the Twin Cities’ investment in trails, sidewalks, dedicated bike-pedestrian bridges and other infrastructure makes the region a safer and more inviting place to walk.

The report also showed the Twin Cities spent a higher percentage of federal transportation funding on bicycle and pedestrian projects than most other regions studied, although it was less than 5 percent. [We ranked sixth.]

The report also notes that pedestrian deaths occur disproportionately among children, the elderly, and ethnic minorities.

These deaths
typically are labeled “accidents,” and attributed to error on the part
of motorist or pedestrian. In fact, however, an overwhelming proportion
share a similar factor: They occurred along roadways that were dangerous by design,
streets that were engineered for speeding cars and made little or no
provision for people on foot, in wheelchairs or on a bicycle.

Going against stereotypes of rage and rudeness, Boston had the second safest streets and New York-Northern New Jersey-Long Island, with the highest proportion of people who walk to work, was third.

This suggests that having more people walking — as with cycling — may contribute to greater safety on the street.